Gift to help city build industrial park, create jobs

TAYLORVILLE, Ill. (WAND) – A five-figure donation is meant to help Taylorville build a new industrial park.

The town claimed a $10,000 donation on Thursday, with money coming in a joint effort between Shelby Electric Cooperative and CoBank’s Sharing Success grant program. CoBank matched a $5,000 gift from Shelby.

“Sharing Success has had a broader and deeper impact than we ever imagined,” said CoBank President Tom Halverson. “We are delighted with the growing participation in the program by our customers, and deeply grateful to them for their assistance in identifying worthy charitable causes deserving of our support. We look forward to partnering with our customers once again this year and to sharing our success, in the best cooperative tradition."

The industrial park would be a 47-acre site northwest of Taylorville’s Walmart and south of Trinity Dodge. It carries a $1.2 million price tag. Project leaders say the effort can create up to 50 new jobs in the first five years, with numbers potentially building to 200 new jobs a decade from now.

“The donation from Shelby Electric and CoBank will help us with a lot of the cost of the project, so we will have (the) cost for marketing once we get it completed,” said Taylorville Development Association Ken Hart. “We’ve just got a lot of places for it to go.”

The people behind the project want to break ground by the middle of 2018.